Greene County

Greene County is two counties wearing one name, and the line between them is where the old ice stopped. West and center, through Linton, Switz City and Lyons, the ground is silt over glacial till, flat to gently rolling, most of it between about four hundred seventy and five hundred fifty feet. Run east toward Solsberry, Koleen and Owensburg and the till runs out. What is under your feet there is weathered sandstone, siltstone and shale with a skin of silt on top, cut into ridge and hollow country whose own place names give it away: Hard Scrabble Ridge, Persimmon Ridge, Blakeman Hollow, Happy Hollow. It is worth being exact about this, because the easy version is wrong in both directions. This county is not unglaciated, since roughly eighty thousand acres of it, close to a quarter, carry soils built over older Illinoian till. And it is not flat Indiana farm country either. The northeast corner runs to about nine hundred and thirty feet near the Monroe County line, the White River leaves the southwest corner at four hundred sixty-one, and better than four hundred and sixty feet of fall between them is more vertical than almost anywhere else we work.

The river here is bigger than anything else we cover. By the time the White River reaches the gage at Newberry it drains four thousand six hundred eighty-eight square miles, because the Eel River comes in below Worthington carrying better than eight hundred square miles of its own. The flood record at that gage runs back to 1897 and it is not a gentle one. June of 2008 put a hundred thirty-eight thousand cubic feet per second past Newberry at a stage of nearly twenty-nine feet, against a major flood stage of twenty-four. The great flood of March 1913 came within eight thousand of it. About fifty-three thousand acres of this county are mapped as frequently flooded, better than one acre in seven, and better than one acre in nine is wet enough to be called hydric. Bottom ground like that has to be graded for the flood that is coming rather than for the weather on the day of the quote. The state draws its approval line for floodway work at one square mile of drainage, which in this county takes in both rivers and nearly every creek carrying a name, There is a narrow exemption for farm and residential stream crossings on drainage up to five square miles, and it is worth knowing exactly how narrow. It holds only if the floodway is not a published federal one, the site sits outside both the town limits and the town's planning jurisdiction, and the crossing does not raise the regulated flood, endanger life or property, or damage fish and wildlife. Miss any one of those and the approval is still required, and the burden of showing you qualified falls on the person who built the crossing. We ask the state rather than assume.

Now the thing that makes Greene County unlike any other county on our map. Better than twenty-three thousand acres here, about one acre in fifteen, are mapped as coal mine spoil. The soil survey gives that ground its own name, Fairpoint, and describes it as exactly what it is: spoil from coal extraction, shale and sandstone and siltstone fragments carried in fine earth, sitting on surface mines, spoil piles and reclaimed land. Read the map units and the county splits a second time. About seven thousand two hundred acres carry the word reclaimed and lie at two to eight percent slopes. About eleven thousand four hundred acres are ungraded bank standing at thirty-five to ninety percent, with another forty-six hundred acres of middling grades in between. Those are not the same job, they are not the same machine day, and anybody quoting them at the same rate has not walked the site.

Working spoil is its own skill and it is worth saying what it does differently. The rock in it is soft and weatherable rather than hard stone, and there is more of it than the number people usually quote. The survey puts the ungraded banks near forty-five percent rock in the top few inches and around eighty percent below that, while the graded reclaimed ground runs under ten percent through its cap. A bucket fills quickly and a compacted lift behaves nothing like clay. Reclaimed ground is recorded as carrying high density, slow water movement and real difficulty getting anything to grow, which is why so much of it sits in grass and timber rather than row crop. That has three consequences on a quote in this county. Seed, cover and topsoil are a line item rather than an afterthought. Ripping is often the whole difference between grass that takes and grass that does not. And nobody should be told what is under a spoil bank without a test pit, because the state's own county mine map warns in its own margin that its locations are approximate and incomplete and that a single site can differ from what is drawn. We read that map as a lead, never as a survey.

One honest limit while we are on the subject. Indiana regulates coal mining at a lower threshold than most people picture. Anyone engaged in coal mining who removes more than two hundred fifty tons of coal from any one location inside twelve consecutive months is an operator under the state program. That is a rule about coal and not about dirt, so ordinary earthwork does not trigger it however much material you move. The western half of this county is still full of ground where hitting coal is a live question rather than a theoretical one. If a job here turns up coal in quantity, the right next step is a call to the state reclamation office, which keeps a field office in Jasonville in this county, and not a shrug and another pass with the machine. We would rather lose a day to a phone call than put a customer sideways with the state.

Ponds in Greene County need care ahead of enthusiasm, and the soil survey is blunt enough to quote. Under three percent of this county rates not limited for holding water in a pond, and not one acre in the whole county rates not limited for building the embankment out of what is already there. The reason, nearly everywhere, is seepage. Then comes the trap, and it catches operators who are not from here. The friendliest digging in the county is the bottomland silt along the White River and the Eel, Haymond and Stendal, just under twenty-nine thousand acres between them, and those two are the soils the survey flags hardest for piping, which is the failure where water threads a path through the embankment and quietly enlarges it until the dam is gone. Easy to dig is not the same as good to build with. A pond down in that bottom ground wants a proper clay core and material chosen on purpose, and the way to know is to open the ground before choosing where the pond goes.

The water already here is old. Seventeen dams in this county sit on the national inventory, fifteen of the seventeen are earth embankments, the median one was finished in 1965 and stands twenty-eight feet, and not one of them was finished after 1973. That is a county full of private earth structures older than most of the people who own them. Fourteen of the seventeen are in private hands, ten are rated low hazard and four significant, one sitting on a tributary of Richland Creek is rated high, and two are undetermined. The biggest of them is not a farm pond at all. It is an earth structure sixteen hundred feet long holding seventy-eight surface acres, and it carries the name of the coal mine it was built to serve, which tells you how much of the standing water in this county traces back to mining rather than to farming. On structures of that age the call we get is almost never about the embankment itself. It is the outlet, and anything moving water through a dam instead of over it is a problem with a clock running on it. Worth knowing too: a dam comes under state jurisdiction once it reaches twenty feet in height, or carries a square mile or more of drainage above it, or impounds a hundred acre feet or more, and a downstream owner can also petition to have one classed high hazard. Those are state lines and they are not what puts a dam on the federal inventory, which runs on its own criteria. Three of these seventeen sit exactly on the twenty foot line, which is a good reason to check rather than eyeball it.

Clearing is a bigger business here than in any county we cover, and the land cover explains it. Federal land cover mapping for 2024 puts better than forty-five percent of Greene County under forest. The same mapping puts Indiana as a whole at about a quarter, and the Forest Service inventory puts the state nearer a fifth. Either way this county carries close to twice the state's share. A logged tract waiting on clear and grub is ordinary work in this county, and it arrives in two very different forms. On the eastern ridges you are pulling stumps out of rocky residual ground on slopes that run from twelve to seventy percent, with bedrock closer to the surface than people expect and haul roads rated low strength, so the road in is half the plan and the wrong road is most of the cost. On the western spoil ground you are working those coarse banks, and the timber is standing there precisely because the ground was never graded back down. In between sits the silt country, where the pan under the topsoil holds water right where the machines need to be and the ground ruts and puddles when it is wet. Season is a real variable on all three, and a clearing job that waits three weeks for the ground to firm often costs less than one that fights it.

Two more things belong in any drainage quote written for this county. The western half is a drained landscape. The federal names register carries seventeen named ditches inside this county, but that is a list of names rather than a list of legal drains, and only the county drainage board can tell you whether a particular ditch is regulated. Any work touching a regulated drain brings in the county surveyor, whose office is in the courthouse annex on East Spring Street in Bloomfield. We have not found a drain inventory published online, so we call and ask rather than assume, and we do it before quoting rather than after. And south of Linton lies Goose Pond, nine thousand ninety-eight acres of restored marsh and prairie held behind better than thirty miles of levee, on ground that was drained and farmed within living memory. We are not going to tell you what that does to your tile, because nobody has published a number we would stand behind. What we will tell you is that drainage work on the ground nearby is working next to a water level that somebody manages on purpose, and that is worth knowing before the trench is open.